Mayor Murray visits Garfield HS for the Hour of Code

posted by: Mr. Bergquist16 December 2014No Comment

Seattle Mayor, Ed Murray, learns to Code at Garfield HS

Mayor Murray with Garfield students for the Hour of Code (photo by Bow Jones of Code.org)

For the 2014 Computer Science Education week, we invited Seattle Mayor, Ed Murray to join our Garfield Exploring Computer Science class for the Hour of Code. Students shared how they are learning programming through the entertaining lessons provided by Code.org: step by step lessons with characters from Frozen, building a Flappy Game, and building Android Apps using our classroom tablets. Additional students from Projects in CS and our Robotics team showed the Mayor how they are using these skills to create mobile Apps and design automated robots.

Mayor Murray coding for the first time.

The Mayor tried try an Hour of Code himself and once he got started, helped by Ellen Jenkins, he did not want to stop – asking to do just one more. We pointed out that the Hour of Code activities will be available online after the CS Ed Week, and he can try them anytime, and so can you – just go to the Code.org Learn Page: code.org/learn

The Mayor was joined by Hoop Somuah, principal XBox engineer at Microsoft, who shared his experiences learning to code games with his brother as a boy and his continued adventures in programming, now as a game designer for XBox. Students enjoyed speaking with Hoop and we will invite him back later to share more.

The Mayor highlighted the importance of learning coding saying “it’s tremendous that all of you are already involved with computer science. Being able to code can open so many doors for you, including exciting and rewarding careers, as you’ll hear from Hoop. Last year during this Hour of Code, more women and African Americans coded than in the last 60 years combined. My office is strongly committed to supporting equality in the workplace, and we believe that computer science is one way we can start to achieve this. If you choose to continue with computer science, there are thousands of jobs waiting for you.” We are very proud to offer 5 periods of computer programming classes every day at Garfield High School and we hope school more will do so in the future. Here’s some inspiration from Code.org…